Men without a History?

This may surprise and even amaze, because, according to the historian Christa Hämmerle, if we look at wartime society and its military leaders “the soldiers – real and imagined – were given the greatest attention and priority for the whole duration of the war.”

Moreover, the Austrian research landscape on the First World War can also avail of comprehensive international scholarship. The focus of its investigations since the 1980s was directed for example on the ‘booming’ history of first-hand reports made by witnesses taking part in the war, the history of everyday life as contained in diaries, forces post and biographical memoirs. Combined with views based on experiences and the history of women and gender, also cultural history introduced into historical academic research in recent years, such sources direct attention towards questions of individual experience and life, memory, self-awareness and -interpretations, ideas of manliness and womanliness, (collective) identities and more.

One of the things the investigations can deduce from these research premises is that the (!) everyday life on the front or the (!) war experience of the (!) soldier never existed.

Historians have to face the far greater task of tackling the profusion of individual experiences, which are then again linked to time and context and thus not easy to generalise. The respective experiences on the front were indeed shaped by many different circumstances and dependent on them. They were affected for instance by a soldier’s position and rank, the weaponry he was handling, the location of action and its duration, the structure within his own troop, the relationship to his superior officers and so forth. Meanwhile we have to take into account such factors as age, the economic and social situation, family status and most of all, in view of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, the soldiers’ nationality.

Translation: Abigail Prohaska